Interesting article by the founder of Meetro about what he learned from his startup experience. Intrigued by the discussion about launch and member growth — he talks about how it first took off in Chicago and then it started spreading into small communities around Chicago. A lesson I leant at Fotolog was the value of compacting social networks — its counter intuitive but it makes sense when you think about it. Communities need to be compact or tightly connected at the outset in order to reach critical mass. Duncan Watts has done a lot of great research on this — Adam Seifer taught me about it in practice. Raw growth is not the right metric to focus on when you start a social network — you need to measure and track the density of those connections — tight, compacted social networks grow faster than thin broadly distributed one's.